Author Cerise Howard

The “Czechoslovak film miracle” of the 1960s has long been synonymous with the Czechoslovak New Wave, a term principally applied to works produced by a storied cluster of filmmakers who emerged that decade thro...

Dualities and parallels abound in Ildikó Enyedi’s remarkable Az én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century, 1989), a singularly playful, magical realist, retro-futuristic, richly allusive, erotically charged, and wi...

Prolific activist-filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim was born Holger Radtke in Nazi-occupied Latvia in 1942. He rebranded himself “Rosa”, to serve as a constant reminder to others of the pink triangle that gay prison...

For all that it contains resonances of queer musical elders – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), the Sandra Bernhard vehicle Without You I'm Nothing (John Boskovich, 1990) and, perhaps most of a...

While there was a KVIFF last year (held uncharacteristically in August, from the 20th to the 28th) and a 16-film-strong roaming festival-in-miniature (“KVIFF at Your Cinema”) staged in 2020, I could attend neit...

It’s not news that the 1960s were an extraordinarily fecund time for cinema in Czechoslovakia; the output of the filmmakers connected to the FAMU-centred Czechoslovak New Wave has been celebrated unstintingly, ...

Jakubisko is kin to Brazil's Glauber Rocha, America's Robert Downey, Mexico's Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland's...

Oftentimes reports of mine on the venerable Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) have looked a mite askance at its gender politics. But along comes 2019 and, shut the front door – the 54th KVIFF’s t...

The work of Czech director Gustav Machatý (1901–1963) is enjoying a surprise renaissance. The 76th Venice Film Festival had as its pre-opening event a screening of a new digital restoration of Extase (Ecstasy),...

"One sensation of mind, one fabric in recollection of touch." - Saleswoman Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed), waxing typically gnomic, in In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018). Peter Strickland's latest hyper-styli...

This year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was always going to have a lot to address. For Czechs (and Slovaks), 2018 is a year overladen with anniversaries, with two in particular impossible t...

A common misconception in the West is that Věra Chytilová directed only a few significant, narratively and aesthetically adventurous films, and all in the 1960s – O něčem jiném (Something Different, 1963), 1966...

The First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema 13-15 November 2017 Lenfilm Studio, St. Petersburg Colloquium website: https://new.culturalforum.ru/event/2017-11-12-pervyj-kollokvium-fipressi-posvy...

The 1960s' Czechoslovak New Wave was lightning in a bottle, a glorious film miracle born of an unrepeatable collision of societal and political factors. An extraordinary pool of talented young filmmakers came t...

Ah, anniversaries. How readily a landmark – and a sense of obligation towards its acknowledgment being given a due sense of occasion – might become more millstone than milestone. And so the challenge presented ...

Few more controversial figures have enlivened cinema than the Polish polymath Walerian Borowczyk; far fewer still experienced so massive a fall from critical grace. At the epicentre of this fall lay La Bête (Th...

“When it came to Fassbinder, ... one was made to feel that the real drama in film after film wasn't so much in the makeshift characters or the fruit-salad images but in the offscreen intrigues of a baby Caligul...

Feature image: Eva Zaoralová holding aloft her book, The Story of a Festival 2015 found the summertime festivals in Karlovy Vary and Odessa in introspective but nonetheless celebratory moods. In Karlovy Vary, ...

Of all the takes on the oft-filmed debonair teller of outlandish heroic tales introduced to the literary world in Rudolf Erich Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Rus...

After three feature length triumphs mixing live-action with animation, Karel Zeman took a departure from sci-fi and fantasy missions implausible and instead engaged mockingly with terrible historical fact. With...

This July just past I attended my second Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, my second in succession, as a member of a five critic-strong FIPRESCI jury. Accordingly, my main focus at the KVIFF this year w...

“Tactile wooden spoons, pot lids, rolling pins and boards are alchemistic tools and our bodies are the crucible for the Magnum Opus of tactilism.” - Jan Švankmajer (1) Jan Švankmajer’s third feature film, S...

I've written three times previously in Senses of Cinema on the Fribourg International Film Festival, covering the festivals in 2010, '11 and '12. While I missed last year's FIFF, it is very clear that each succ...

Mine was at least a twofold purpose for flying half way around the world to the far west late this June just passed. Long had I wanted to make my way to Karlovy Vary for the Czech Republic's A-list film festiva...

“The very name conjures up childhood & poetry.” (1) – Jean Cocteau “‘Mr. Deitch, I am a very famous man!’ Jiří Trnka was indeed a very famous man – in Czechoslovakia and in the entire world of animation....

In the wake of former Artistic Director Edouard Waintrop's triumphal, ceremonious departure to become Director of Les Cinémas du Grütli in Geneva at the close of last year's edition – all bouquets, nary a b...

At the time of writing we are but a few weeks out from the 84th Academy Awards. Extraordinarily, the two films most likely to be most showered with Oscars at this year’s ceremony are The Artist (Michel Hazanavi...

The Film Festival Cottbus: 21 this year! One might then pause to consider, with the festival attaining maturity (if we were to arbitrarily decide that 21 is, as we do with humans, a marker of such): does its mi...

For two years running I've attended the Fribourg International Film Festival. The timing of my engagements with the festival has been propitious; it strikes me that the FIFF is a festival just now coming into i...

To retain only the word cinema, without an adjective. – Edouard Waintrop, Director of the Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF) (1) This pocket manifesto from Director of FIFFs 22 through to 24 ended a ...

A Quick Backgrounder, For Those Who Came in Late With its advent smack-bang on the first year of a new millennium, Mezipatra, the Czech Republic's queer film festival and, by a considerable margin, its large...

Who'd a thunk it? All of a sudden the Persian Gulf is host to a slew of film festivals brimming with internationalist, top-tier ambition and seemingly mad keen to hothouse a vibrant homegrown film culture. T...

18-29 March 2009 (1) In 2009, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) can – and does – still boast of being the second biggest film festival in Melbourne, quite an accomplishment in a city where, barrin...

Třeboň 1-4 May 2009 Teplice 7-10 May 2009 My second AniFest, after my first sally to the Czech Republic and its proliferative animation festival just last year (1), found me in the privileged position of re...

7–13 May 2008 Such a hive of industry was the seventh AniFest, an annual international competitive festival – and much more besides – held in the small, picturesque South Bohemian town of Třeboň. For ato...

26 July – 13 August, 2006 Excepting an Opening Night publicity coup, of which, more below, the Melbourne International Film Festival’s last year with James Hewison as Executive Director unfurled much as ...